Google, Oracle Workers Enlisted for Obamacare Tech Surge

The administration began touting a “tech surge” on Oct. 20, as a robust response to the software and technology errors on healthcare.gov that have prevented people from enrolling in health plans under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg

The help is arriving as the government’s main site for
medical coverage remains plagued by repeated outages a month
after its Oct. 1 debut. Michael Dickerson, a site reliability
engineer on leave from Google, and Greg Gershman, innovation
director for smartphone application maker Mobomo, are among
those helping, the Obama administration said yesterday.

“They are working through the analytics of what happens on
the site to prioritize what needs to be fixed,” Julie Bataille,
a spokeswoman for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid
Services, told reporters on a conference call. Dickerson is
working to improve the stability of the website, while Gershman
is “helping the development process be more agile.”

The administration began touting a “tech surge” on Oct.
20, to cure the software errors underlying healthcare.gov that
have hindered people from enrolling in coverage and insurers
from collecting data. Kathleen Sebelius, the U.S. Health and
Human Services secretary, apologized before Congress two days
ago and said her agency has pulled in outside help to achieve
“an optimally functioning” exchange by the end of November.

Offering Help

“I know it’s a very political topic,” Oracle Chief
Executive Officer Larry Ellison said yesterday at the software
maker’s annual meeting. “As an information technology company
we are doing everything we can to help.”

Oracle, based in Redwood City, California, is the world’s
largest database-software maker. Mountain View, California-based
Google and Raleigh, North Carolina-based Red Hat declined to
comment.

The federal website is the main portal for millions of
uninsured people in 36 of the 50 U.S. states to shop for private
health insurance plans, with the help of government tax credits,
as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of
2010. Fourteen states have created their own exchanges.

An estimated 7 million people will gain coverage in 2014
through the federal and state exchanges, according to the
Congressional Budget Office.

Top Adviser

The administration hasn’t previously quantified the tech
surge. Jeffrey Zients, President Barack Obama’s incoming chief
economic adviser, was brought in to advise Bataille’s agency,
and the project’s management has since been reorganized, with
UnitedHealth Group Inc.’s Quality Software Services unit now
overseeing the entire operation.

The site previously had no lead contractor. It was largely
built by a unit of Montreal-based CGI Group Inc. UnitedHealth’s
QSSI built the “data services hub” that collects information
about customers from the Internal Revenue Service and other
agencies, and feeds it to the federal and state websites.

Dickerson is working with QSSI, while Gershman is working
with CGI Group, Bataille said yesterday.

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, led by
Marilyn Tavenner, had been responsible for building and running
the exchange website. She appeared before the House Ways and
Means Committee this week and blamed the contractors for the
website woes.

Her comments followed a hearing a week prior where units of
CGI Group and UnitedHealth said a branch of the health agency
was responsible for the end-to-end testing of the site that
should have been done months earlier. The government conducted
final tests just days before the site went public Oct. 1, while
similar projects are tested for months, the contractors said.

Enrollment Deadline

About 8.6 million people visited the federal website in the
first week, encountering software flaws and long waits that
prevented many from even registering. HHS has said that capacity
is being added to the system and multiple upgrades are being
made to the software code, though as of two days ago error
messages were still being displayed for some users.

Getting the site fixed soon is critical as Americans who
don’t have health insurance by March 31 may have to pay a fine
of as much as 1 percent of their income.